February’s Civic Tech Events

Thanks to everyone who shared event links and invitations with us. We’re looking forward to seeing you around the city all this month. Check out some of our favorite events taking place in NYC in February:

All month

Carol Jenkins toured the new African American Museum in Washington, DC, as part of her program “Black America” on CUNY TV. You can view the hour-long show, “More Than A Building, A Dream Come True” online at cuny.tv/show/blackamerica/PR2005859.

Regulatory agencies—especially the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission—have risen to prominence on technology security and privacy issues. Drawing on recent federal experience, this talk will explain why FTC, FCC, and similar agencies have assumed policy leadership roles, what legal authorities are at their disposal, and how agencies have exercised their authorities. The presentation will include case studies of both successes and failures, and it will offer suggestions on best practices and recurring challenges. The talk will also address how researchers and civil society groups can effectively engage with regulatory agencies.

Join LMHQ for a fireside chat about the business of comedy, where we’ll give attendees a peek behind the curtain about what goes into making comedy work. More funny folks are experimenting with comedic mediums, more clubs are opening for standup, and comedy is being woven more effortlessly into the fabric of pop culture on a daily basis. What does it take, beyond the performance, to make comedy as a business successful?

Moderated by Taylor Moore, comedian and comedy curator at Kickstarter, in conversation with Justine Giannino, Manager of Original Programming (Current Series & Development) at IFC TV; JD Amato, Director and Executive Producer of The Chris Gethard Show; Jasmine Pierce, Writer at Reductress and Heidi Vanderlee, Publicist at Shark Party Media.

A conversation about the meaning of mobility and the role of design as a process that can cultivate a culture of accessibility that goes beyond accommodations. Sara Hendren (Olin College of Engineering) and April Coughlin (SUNY, New Paltz) will discuss physical, structural, social, and attitudinal barriers within and outside of the classroom, that shape access to education for students with disabilities. The discussion will be moderated by Jessica Murray (Futures Initiative Fellow, GC Doctoral Student in Human Development). You can also watch the live stream at bit.ly/FuturesED-live and follow along at #fight4edu.

Conversations is a series of events focused on open discussions on the changing new media landscape. Our events will feature panels with insights from the most respected news organizations, the newest disruptive publishers, and tech and media thought leaders. Through conversations, let’s work to transform media together.
The role of fake news — from PizzaGate to the 2016 election — is of grave importance, and a debate is roiling in tech and media circles about its impact and what can be done to curb it going forward.

By the time we reach the next presidential election cycle, the volume of fake and machine-generated news, information, commentary and debate may explode. From algorithmically composed text to photorealistic video simulations of people and events, from conversational bots to machine-generated audio that is indiscernible from the voices of politicians, there is a high probability that discourse among citizens will take place in a universe of fictions.

This event — structured as a debate — will chart and discuss key areas of technological advance that will impact the information landscape and consider how technology companies, media, governments and academia will respond to the benefit or detriment of democracy. It will imagine potential futures, and identify developments that are key to understanding which of those futures is most likely to play out. Crucially, it will ask the audience to decide: can we solve this problem? Or is fake news an unavoidable side effect of the internet?

For BigApps participants — In this session, we will apply a human-centered and empathic approach to design research and ethnography in order to deeply understand unmet user needs. Some of these activities will include user and subject matter expert interviews, as well as observations and secondary research. Participants will come away with an understanding of the core principles of design research.

Join Civic Hall members & the Hacker Hours community for an informal coworking session to give & receive support from developers, engineers, data scientists, and other technical professionals. Open to all skill levels.

Hear Trebor Scholz in conversation with Yochai Benkler to celebrate the publication of Trebor’s new books, Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers are Disrupting the Digital Economy (Polity) and, co-edited with Nathan Schneider, Ours to Hack and to Own. The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet (OR Books).

For the second installment of the Parks Without Borders Discussion Series, NYC Parks welcomes leadership from New York City’s Public Design Commission. This discussion will delve into how government agencies can rethink guidelines, concepts, and expectations to sustain lasting value, helping to support a more seamless public realm.

Girl Develop It NYC is hosting its first-ever hackathon! It will be a one day event for all skill levels to work in groups on projects with the added bonus of skill-building workshops attendees can sign up for. This is a great opportunity to try out a hackathon with beginners like you, learn new skills and work on exciting projects with support from mentors and other GDI members.

If you’ve ever tried to map a historical database, you understand how hard it is to do all the things at once. Showing data over time presents unique issues: overlapping features, navigation through time and parallel boundaries/standards/data are just the beginning.

Well, we are going to help you get started by presenting a few projects which went all the way there. Whether through obsession or assigmnet, they’ve scraped old books and photographed old maps. They’ve digitized and georeferenced. And they’ve finally made something new from the activities of the past.

So join us for a little time-travel with maps. We look forward to seeing you in the past and future.

Across the United States, designers are using cognitive computing and data analysis to help American cities meet the needs of their diverse populations. Tiffany Chu, Code for America fellow and cofounder of the public transport data initiative Remix; Adam Cutler, distinguished designer at IBM Design; and Sarah Williams, director of MIT’s Civic Data Design Lab and cocreator of the City Digits: Local Lotto project, will discuss the promise and challenges of this important partnership with moderator Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design. Remix and City Digits: Local Lotto are currently on view in the special exhibition By the People: Designing a Better America.

*This event has a $15 admission price. Admission is reduced to $8 for educators, seniors, and students.*

Some of the most remarkable impacts of digital media on political activism lie not in the new types of speech it supports, but in the new forms of listening that it fosters among organized pressure groups. Organized advocacy groups are increasingly turning to digital analytics in order to gauge supporter interest, monitor public sentiment, experiment with new tactics, and craft strategies that resonate in the new media environment. In his new book, Analytic Activism, Dave Karpf discusses the heretofore overlooked role of analytics in organized political engagement. He explores how this new mode of activism works, how it is produced, what it is useful for, and what its limitations are. In this public talk, he’ll discuss how the themes of Analytic Activism relate to the new challenges we face in the He Who Must Not Be Named Era.

In her trenchant analysis of U.S. history, literary critic and Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers considers the aftermath of the notion of partus sequitur ventrem—the “American ‘innovation’ that proclaimed that the child born of an enslaved mother would also be enslaved.” In this lecture, Spillers engages the idea of the “shadow” family to explain one of the tectonic shifts in the concept and practice of social relations in the New World from the 18th century—a period of profound contradiction and change when dangerously hegemonic definitions of race, gender, and family took hold—onward. Registration for the evening lecture is preferred but not required.

Journalism’s adjustment to the digital age has required a crash course in data and analytics. The editor’s hunch now sits next to realtime metrics on content performance across a dizzying array of channels.

How do leading publications like The New York Times adjust to a wide range of new competitors? How has data been introduced to newsroom staff and leadership? How has it affected newsroom decision making? What can be done to ensure that we protect the craft of investigative journalism while ensuring it finds and resonates with a meaningful audience?

Please join us for a rich, attendee-driven discussion on what data-driven journalism should look like and how it should serve a society in need. Also, sandwiches. Always sandwiches.

Sidewalk Labs is an Alphabet company that imagines, designs, tests, and builds new technologies that address big urban problems across a range of areas, from mobility to housing to government services.

Upcoming:

Saturday, March 4th, all day

Save the date: NYC School of Data

NYC School of Data 2017

Saturday, Mar 4, 2017, 9:00 AM

Location details are available to members only.

187 Brigade Members Went

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=Currently, the event is at capacity. RSVPing to this meetup does not promise entry. Please visit eventbrite for the waitlist.=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=New York City School of Data is a community conference showcasing NYC’s civic design, civic/government technology, and open data ecosystem.Through TEN thought provoking sessions and THIRTEE…